Remember the controversy in 2012 when President Obama said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

In context, the president was trying to make the point that in addition to our own hard work, others contributed to whatever level of success we have attained. The president suggested no one achieves success on his or her own. Republicans took his words as just another indicator that Democrats want more government control over our lives and businesses.

The New York Times appears to have endorsed Obama’s view and gone a step further. The newspaper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, recently called a staff meeting to announce “The 1619 Project,” named for the year the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. Someone recorded the session and leaked it to Slate, which published a transcript. The Washington Examiner reported on it.

“The goal of the 1619 Project,” says a statement from the newspaper “is to reframe American history.” More like rewrite it. This is the stuff of totalitarian regimes where the media serve as a propaganda organ for the state, in this case the surging left wing of the Democratic Party.

No more America beginning with the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers and the Constitution. Africans had no say in these, though Jefferson’s brilliant line about all of us being created equal would resound nearly a century later in a Civil War that led to the freeing of slaves and the long road to achieving Jefferson’s noble statement.

Not satisfied with practicing what used to be called journalism, it appears the newspaper’s ultimate goal is to change what is taught in public schools so that children will no longer think highly of their country because of the “stain” of slavery, a stain that has been more than paid for in blood and federal programs, which have attempted to lift some descendants of slaves out of poverty. In many cases those programs have failed, poverty having many causes, but liberals continue to promote them because it seemingly makes them feel better about themselves.

The Examiner’s Byron York writes: “The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine.”

One excerpt reveals their drift: “If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” Never mind that “brutal” capitalism has lifted more boats than any other economic system.

There’s much more. We are led to believe that America is evil, soulless, that those at the top have always exploited those at the bottom. There’s appears to be advocacy for bigger government, reparations and never-ending guilt for things we today had nothing to do with. Is this what we want to impose on our children?

The New York Times, despite Donald Trump’s criticism, carries influence with broadcast and cable networks like CNN and MSNBC, and these networks in turn can have a collective effect on the American psyche, particularly when there is no counterbalance.

No wonder private and home schools are growing at such a rapid pace. The National Home Education Research Institute projects that by next year the number of home schools will be 2.3 million, a major increase over recent years. According to the Department of Education, about 10 percent of children in grades K through 12 now attend private schools. If politicians allowed for school choice, the number would likely be higher.

The Times’ attempt to shape history to fit its own biases is not journalism. If public schools follow its lead, they will begin to resemble schools in countries where freedom is not the prevailing tenet and antithetical to what the Founders gave us. America’s greatness eventually led to the freeing of slaves and a chance at a better life for their descendants.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/64979?mailing_id=4486&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4486&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

During a December 2015 debate among Republican presidential candidates in Las Vegas, former Florida governor Jeb Bush said to Donald Trump: “You can’t insult your way to the presidency.”

Never mind.

The question for next year’s election is whether the insulter-in-chief can use the same tactic to win a second term. It depends on two other questions: who the Democrats end up nominating and whether voters see that person as too far left (as the leading candidates unarguably are) and two, whether enough voters who held their noses and voted for Trump last time will be sufficiently turned off that they will stay home.

Yes, early polls are usually meaningless, but there are warning signs that should be heeded.

A new Fox News poll suggests potential problems for the president on the second question. The president’s favorite network (until recently when he began criticizing the goose laying golden eggs for him) shows his disapproval rating has soared to 56 percent, one point lower than his record high in October 2017. His disapproval numbers ticked up sharply last month, rising 5 percent.

More troubling is the drop in approval of the president’s job performance from 46 percent last month, to 43 percent now. His record low approval rating was 38 percent, also in October 2017.

Other statistics from the Fox poll that should concern the White House: a record number of men (53 percent) disapprove of the president. These include 46 percent of white men and 64 percent of crucial independent voters. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.

None of this seems to bother the president, who engaged in more insults in a speech last week in Manchester, New Hampshire, a state he lost to scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton by just .37 percent in 2016.

In that speech Mr. Trump took a “vote for me, even if you hate me, because the Democrats will ruin the economy” approach. While that may be true, there are intangibles that also influence voters, including how America positions itself before the world. There is no question that President Trump is pushing back against liberalism, socialism and the notion that Democrats must always set the agenda and Republicans are left to respond to it. That is what has solidified uncritical support among his base.

But — and this is a very big but — there is also the issue of deportment, something taught at home and in school when I was a child. Manners, character, honesty, consistency and how others see you were also traits thought important to instill in young men and women.

Is the economy all that matters? Have we become that cynical? Perhaps some of his uncritical evangelical supporters might point to a verse which says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10), or “Whoever loves money never has enough.” (Ecclesiastes 5:10).

We are, or ought to be, more than what we possess. We are not in a civil war, despite what one might see, read or hear.

Before the Civil War started, our 16th president said something our 45th president might wish to consider: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

The president might win a second term, insulting along the way, but will it have been worth it if he continues to appeal to the worst devils that are also in our nature?   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/64931?mailing_id=4481&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4481&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

In an extraordinary and outrageous move endangering the constitutionally mandated independence of the U.S. Supreme Court, five Democratic senators are threatening political retaliation against the court unless it denies the Second Amendment rights of New Yorkers in its first gun case in a decade.

Not since 1937 — when newly reelected Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt proposed adding additional justices to the Supreme Court in a blatant move to produce decisions more favorable to his New Deal agenda — has there been such a serious attempt to change the way the judicial branch of government operates in order to change the outcome of its decisions.

In fact, going back even further in history, the threat the Democratic senators are posing to the judiciary’s independence is arguably the greatest since that made by Britain’s King George against the 13 British colonies before they became the United States. Our Declaration of Independence lists these threats as one justification for the American Revolution.

Back in 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee — led by Roosevelt’s fellow Democrats — refused to go along with what became known as his court-packing scheme. This committee stated in a report on Roosevelt’s legislative proposal that it was “nothing more than the declaration that when the Court stands in the way of a legislative enactment, the Congress may reverse the ruling by enlarging the Court.”

Fast forward to today’s similar situation. Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, scumbag-Richard Durbin of Illinois, worthless-Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York have replaced Roosevelt in the role of trying to manipulate the Supreme Court.

The Democratic senators are threatening the independence of the Supreme Court because they are determined to curtail the constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms in a case called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. City of New York.

The legal brief filed in the case by the senators not only threatens the independence of the judiciary — it threatens the rule of law. The senators are engaging in a form of extortion, warning justices that grave harm will befall the Supreme Court if the justices don’t rule the way the senators want.

As they fashioned our unique system of government, America’s founders singled out several elements they considered critical to its success. Alexander Hamilton, for example, wrote that the “independence of the courts” is “peculiarly essential.”

The five senators would be wise to heed Hamilton.

This case before the Supreme Court that has prompted the senators’ move against the high court challenges a New York state law that allows a licensed gun owner in New York City to transport a handgun (even if locked up and unloaded) outside his or her home only to one of a few shooting ranges in the city.

The five Democratic senators want the high court to uphold the law, even though it clearly makes a mockery of our Second Amendment rights. But they can’t demand that result just because they want it.

The brief filed by the senators asserts: “The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it.”

The lawsuit by the senators cites polls supposedly showing that a narrow majority of Americans believe that Supreme Court decisions are “motivated by” or “too influenced by” politics.

The final paragraph of the senators’ legal brief concludes with this ominous warning: “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’ Particularly on the urgent issue of gun control, a nation desperately needs it to heal.”

There you have it. These legislators have fired a shot across the judiciary’s bow. Change your ways, ignore the constitutional protections that we don’t like — such as the Second Amendment — or we will change you. Start making decisions that further our political agenda, or we will create a judiciary that will.

Compared to these senators, King George and President Franklin Roosevelt were amateurs in their attacks on the judiciary.

The warning from the senators comes on the heels of growing calls to pack the courts — as Roosevelt tried and failed to do — and an obviously unconstitutional proposal to “rotate” Supreme Court justices in and out of the high court, analyzed here and here.

These — and the five senators’ not-so-subtle threat to “restructure” the judiciary — are not about appointing judges who follow a particular approach to deciding cases. Every president does that.

No, the threat here is to literally manipulate the structure of the judicial branch itself, to reconfigure it to deliberately produce more desirable results in certain cases based on politics — not the law.

In August 1997, then-Attorney General Janet Reno spoke to the American Bar Association House of Delegates, warning against “heated rhetoric” about the judiciary, including criticism that can “undermine the very credibility of the judiciary.”

The ABA took up the cause, creating a commission on judicial independence that held hearings on the issue. Its report warned about criticism that, even if it does not influence court decisions, can undermine “public confidence in the judiciary and judicial independence.”

Where is the ABA today? If it was concerned about criticism undermining judicial independence, how can it be silent when senators threaten to restructure the judicial branch to obtain the decisions they want?

Don’t be misled by the spin from those like the five Democratic senators, who today threaten a hostile judicial takeover. They define decisions they don’t like as proof that the judiciary has been “politicized” because that sounds better than saying they want judges who will deliver the political goods no matter what the law says or what the actual facts are in a case.

Four of the five senators threatening to restructure the judiciary today are current members of the Judiciary Committee — the same committee that killed Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme.

Suppose that we, as lawyers, filed a friend of the court brief in state court where judges are elected, threatening to work against them in their next election unless they ruled our way. We would justifiably be subject to severe sanctions. Yet the five Democratic senators are hiding behind the authority of their elected positions to do the very same thing.

Judicial independence, especially from political manipulation, remains “peculiarly essential” to the system that provides the liberty we all enjoy. It remains, as the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist said, one of the “crown jewels” of our system of government.

All Americans, as well as judges on any court, should reject such attempts to manipulate the judicial system for political gain.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/64926?mailing_id=4481&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4481&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Socialism is popular because the Left is adept at controlling the narrative. This may be a hard fact to face, but face it we must. The Left controls public education, the news media, and the entertainment industry. For the last couple of generations, leftists in these venues have altered the perceptions of what America is to millions of young people. Now that they have reached a point of critical mass, they are looking to convince these same young people to cast aside our great republic in favor of a socialist regime.

A new organization has stepped into the fray to challenge this assault. Young Americans Against Socialism set up shop just last week with the goal of spreading the truth about socialism, in part by sharing true stories of the young people who have lived it.

YAAS was founded by Morgan Zegers, the 22-year-old daughter of an Iraq War vet who ran for the New York State Assembly in 2018 to help stop the downward economic spiral of her home state. Zegers gained a great deal of media attention for her ultimately unsuccessful effort and was named a Rising Star of the New York GOP and the New York Young Republicans.

Zegers’s strategy is to use two of the Left’s powerful tools against them: emotion and social media. Social media is the most obvious place to have this conversation because that is where Zegers will find her target audience. The Left relies on emotion because it produces quick and powerful responses and because it clouds reason and judgment, two concepts that are Kryptonite to any socialist idea. The videos YAAS will post on social media recount emotional stories of young people who have directly suffered under socialism and have blessedly escaped its clutches.

Zegers will also use social media to set the record straight about socialism. Among the myths to be dispelled are the so-called heroism of the prolific murderer Che Guevara, why the Left insists on incorrectly categorizing Scandinavian countries as socialist, what really happened to oil-rich Venezuela, and how capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in world history.

Given her youth and her dedicated social-media strategy, Zegers is in a better position to change the narrative than a news pundit that young people probably won’t even watch. It’s exciting to see another group dedicated to pushing back against socialism’s appeal to America’s youth. It’s been a long time coming, and as Zegers argues, we must push back because Liberty is worth fighting for.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64928?mailing_id=4481&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4481&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The War of the Roses that’s significant now for the purpose of commemoration relates to a dust up between the red and yellow roses worn by opponents and supporters, respectively, in Tennessee 99 years ago this week.

The Centennial of Woman Suffrage is commencing and will be celebrated through August 2020 to celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment empowering 27 million woman to participate in elections and the constitutional republic of America back in 1920. But the story didn’t start in 1920.

Follow the history to the pinnacle moments in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dating back to 1848, prior to the Civil War, the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented “The Declaration of Sentiments,” crafted from the Declaration of Independence. The document was signed by 68 women and 32 men of the 300 in attendance and it cited several reasons for their movement. Among them were the fact that women had no voice in the laws created that governed their lives — specifically related to child custody in the case of the husband’s death as well as property rights of a female with a pursuit of access to education and professions such as medicine and law.

In 1850 at the First National Women’s Rights Convention, key abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth participated.

During the era of the Civil War, Suffragists worked to support abolition in hopes that the effort for women’s suffrage would be included in the ratification amendments addressing slavery and citizenship. Yet the so-called Reconstruction Amendments failed to include American women. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. The 14th Amendment of 1868 entitles “all persons born or naturalized in the United States to citizenship and equal protection under the laws of the United States” … except American women. In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified giving the vote to “all male citizens regardless of color or previous condition of servitude.” Still not women.

So, the struggle for women to have the right to vote continued. Susan B. Anthony illegally cast her ballot for President Ulysses S. Grant for president in 1872 and was arrested. Sojourner Truth requested a ballot in Michigan the same year and was denied. In 1878, Sen. Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA) introduced the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, aiming to pass the 16th Amendment. It was worded exactly the same as the 19th Amendment that passed in 1920, yet it failed.

As Suffragists organized using the tools of their day — word of mouth, letters, newspaper articles, telegrams, and good old-fashioned organizing, the effort grew despite the best efforts to muddy the political water with issues such as race and temperance surrounding the prohibition of alcohol. Anti-Suffragists even referenced Holy Scripture to paint a picture of destruction that would come from the ability for women to vote.

As states were added to the Union, Wyoming became the first to award universal suffrage to its American citizens in 1869, with western states growing in number honoring the voice of women versus the eastern counterparts whose governing documents included no such provisions.

A pause in the organizational efforts occurred in 1914 when the U.S. entered World War I and women lent not only their hearts but both hands in becoming much of the workforce creating munitions and doing the jobs formerly held by men sent to fight. At the conclusion of WWI and after much pressure to his initial resistance, President Woodrow Wilson supported efforts via Congress to move on the 19th Amendment.

On June 4, 1919, the Senate passed enabling legislation that began the process of constitutional ratification, 41 years after the amendment language was first introduced. Thirty-six of the existing 48 states would be required to successfully amend the Constitution.

By 1920, 35 states’ legislatures had passed the needed legislation with five remaining that could be the last — the “Perfect 36.” Connecticut, Vermont, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee were states remaining to debate the issue within their respective legislatures, with the Volunteer State offering the best hope.

Back in April 1918, the Tennessee Suffragists had successfully worked to obtain partial suffrage with the ability to vote in local elections. This hope made Nashville the epicenter of both the Suffragists and “Anti’s” who located both their headquarters at The Hermitage Hotel, just across the street from the Capitol once Governor Albert H. Roberts had called a special session of the General Assembly.

Upon convening in the heat of August 1920, the Tennessee Senate passed the resolution with ease while the Tennessee House was divided. Several votes had been taken in efforts to table the resolution, protecting members from casting ballots on the actual issue.

To assist in voting counting, ladies of each lobbying effort employed rose boutonnieres: The “Anti’s” distributed red roses for their efforts while yellow roses were donned on the lapels of state House members prepared to stand in support of woman suffrage.

On August 18, 1920, suffragists and anti-suffragists packed the galleries in the Tennessee House. Speaker Seth Walker of Lebanon led the “antis” while Joseph Hanover of Memphis led for women in the tension-filled chamber. The vote to table the amendment, which would have effectively “killed” the bill, failed with a tie. A second vote was called to move the resolution.

The youngest House member, 24-year-old Harry Burn (R-Niota), faced an internal dilemma. His coat pocket held a seven-page letter from Febb Burn, his mother. Febb had read the speeches given in the Tennessee Senate in her local paper and was angry. Among general news of the family farm, Febb used the letter to persuade her son to change his anti-suffrage stance, taken in deference to his county’s more senior senator, H.M. Candler, who made a “bearcat” of a speech stirring Burn’s mom. Febb wrote, “Dear Son: Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification. Your Mother.”

A college-educated, 46-year-old woman running a farm as a widow, Febb employed illiterate farm workers who had the vote, while she did not. Sporting a red anti-suffrage rose, Burn shocked the chamber by declaring “aye” for the amendment, thus breaking a tie and changing the course of history.

Activist efforts of the anti-suffragists failed to reverse the vote. On August 24, 1920, Governor Albert H. Roberts certified Tennessee’s ratification and, two days later, U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby officially certified the 19th Amendment as part of the United States Constitution.

This War of the Roses forever impacted American history. So, abandon the pink hats of the angry, militant women fighting for abortion-on-demand and give a rest to the red of the GOP and the blue of the Democrats. For the rest of the month of August, don your best shade of yellow for the Woman Suffrage history that begins its centennial year. Yes, Mrs. Febb, it’s Hurrah for suffrage!  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64913?mailing_id=4479&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4479&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

In a highly insightful column, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk illuminates what ordinary Americans are really up against, courtesy of transnational elitists whose see countries, patriotism, and a significant portion of their fellow Americans as anachronistic, or beneath contempt. Globalists are “citizens of the world,” and if their profits and “principles” are served by hollowing out middle America, or accommodating the Chinese military while snubbing our own, so be it.

Buskirk explains the origins of their mindset. “All of us share a rich heritage that is under attack by a pernicious idea as old as human history,” he writes. “It is the idea with which the serpent tempted Eve, it is the idea that man can be his own god.”

He goes on to identify the chief characteristics of this megalomania. Globalism is an “advanced form of secular liberalism” that is “messianic” and “dehumanizing.” Those who challenge its supremacy? They are “shamed, deplatformed, ostracized, and often made unemployable,” he adds.

Yet the most revealing part of the globalism centers around its “materialist, man-centered nature.” Why? Because that nature makes globalist elites “overtly hostile to Biblical religion and the family, both of which represent competing power centers and must therefore be degraded or destroyed.”

Thus, “bitter clingers” who have the temerity to resist making cakes celebrating same-sex weddings must be sued — and sued again — even after the Supreme Court rules in favor of First Amendment religious protections. Public schools must embrace the transgender agenda, even at the kindergarten level, while teaching American students to hold their own nation in contempt. Alternative lifestyles, are promoted as being equal, if not superior, to the nuclear family, even as the nuclear family itself has been eviscerated by the Nanny State.

Moreover, the rise of another pernicious concept, “identity politics,” is no accident. Keeping the “peasants” distracted by race, gender, and sexual identity is designed to keep “the wage-earning classes, meaning, almost everyone — from focusing on the fact that real wages have stagnated for nearly 50 years while the price of the three largest expenditures in life (housing, education, and healthcare) have soared,” Buskirk explains.

The peasants’ primary supporter? The concerted effort by the globalist-run, Democrat Media Complex to convince  the nation that President Donald Trump is a racist has been unrelenting. And because it hasn’t worked out quite as well as expected, he is now a “white supremacist” — a term not only applied to Trump but to everyone who   voted for him. That leftists can say this despite the reality that many of those same voters opted for Barack scumbag/liar-nObama — twice — is indicative of the utter contempt they have for the average American’s ability to notice such monumental hypocrisy.

That contempt is driven by the globalist reduction of humanity itself to economic terms, whereby people become nothing more than interchangeable cogs in the globalist machinery. They also become expendable. Note the globalist antipathy toward Trump’s effort to reform an intellectual property-stealing and militarily belligerent China via tariffs, despite the reality that its government stands on the verge of crushing populist dissent in Hong Kong. Globalists are no doubt concerned — but only with the economic implications.

Make that economic implications directly related to their own interests. By stark contrast, columnist Pat Buchanan  reveals what three decades of globalism have wrought economically for ordinary Americans: “$12 trillion in trade deficits and a loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs.”

Social costs have been egregious as well: “more divorces, more consumer debt, more children raising themselves because their mother is forced to work outside the home to make ends meet, and a declining fertility rate,” Buskirk explains. “Across Europe and the United States, citizens are not having enough children to replace themselves.”

The globalist “solution” to decreasing domestic populations? Rather than incentivize child-bearing, globalists embrace unfettered immigration, both legal and illegal. Anyone who disagrees is “bigoted” and “xenophobic.” Ironically, the same globalists talk about the ascension of job-killing artificial intelligence, and yet again the “solution” they propose for that problem isn’t limiting immigration. It’s Universal Basic Income, absent any concern for the dignity-sapping implications it engenders.

After all, what “interchangeable cog” wouldn’t be content with “free money?”

Buskirk believes the time is ripe for a wholesale assault on the status quo, and the keys are reviving the institutions that used to form the bedrock of the nation. They include family, religion and real life friends as opposed to the orchestrated diminishment of friendship wrought by social media. He also proposes the abolition of post-war globalist institutions that were founded by the United States but “have become destructive and actually undermine the peace and prosperity of the American nation and degrade human life here and abroad.” It’s hard to argue with the two examples he cites, namely the United Nations and the European Union.

His boldest proposal? Breaking the two-income family “trap” by proposing a “‘Family Deal’ that will reorder the American economy in a way that allows a family of five or six to be solidly middle class on a single income and that emphasizes growth through innovation rather than financialization,” he asserts.

These are excellent ideas, but the bet here is none them are attainable until we recognize one of the most serious problems this nation has ever faced: We now have at least two generations of Americans who are virtually unable to make the distinction between real life and cyberspace — or at the very least, willing to give both an equal measure of importance.

As result of this unprecedented development, a metastatic level of social dysfunction has taken hold, manifesting itself as “look at me” narcissism, pathological “copy-cat-ism,” and sexually debilitating isolationism, even as the tech companies engage in what Buskirk defines as “surveillance capitalism” that for all intents and purposes keeps people in line in a way that makes George Orwell’s 1984 seem benign by comparison.

In short, this nation must address what the tech elitist-driven wholesale destruction of privacy is really doing to the human psyche, no matter how many dopamine-inducing “likes” ultimately end up on the ash heap of history. Restricting the access of social media to those over the age of 18, much like we restrict access to alcohol, is a great way to begin. More important, a law restricting the tech titans from accessing a minor’s data, much like Google currently does with impunity in America’s classrooms, should also be enacted.

In short, globalism is totalitarianism with better PR. If America is to remain a sovereign nation it must be thoroughly repudiated.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64907?mailing_id=4479&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4479&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body